Day: April 27, 2011

Zephoria Inc.: An “internet marketing consulting company based in New York focused on helping companies maximize their online exposure through search engine optimization, web analytics, and marketing focused web development” who don’t have a clue about how social media actually works.

Zephoria: danah boyd’s online nickname which she has been using since 1998.

Tumblr: A sort-of blogging platform with staff who have really put their foot in it this time.

The Chorus: Bloggers, Twitterers and other random persons who will show Zephoria Inc and Tumblr just how social media really works.

The Story

danah blogged this evening about how she had been using Tumblr as a place to collect random bits of stuff, with the URL zephoria.tumblr.com. Zephoria has been her ID online for ages:

I’ve been using the handle “zephoria” online since around 1998 when I started signing messages with that handle while still at Brown. It’s actually a funny blurring of two things: zephyr and euphoria. Zephyr was the name of the instant messaging service at Brown and the name of the dog that I lived with in 1997, two things that I loved dearly. And talking about euphoria was a personal joke between me and a friend.

But suddenly, her Tumblr blog has been moved to zephoria1.tumblr.com, seemingly without any discussion or permission given on her part. Her original zephoria.tumblr.com is now used by Zephoria Inc, whose main home is Zephoria.com (compare and contrast to danah’s Zephoria.org).

Zephoria Inc say that they named themselves after “Greek mythology’s west wind”, though they seem to just have a problem spelling ‘Zephyr’:

ORIGIN late Old English zefferus, denoting a personification of the west wind, via Latin from Greek zephuros ‘(god of) the west wind.’ Sense 1 dates from the late 17th cent.

So they can’t even get their name right.

It seems that Zephoria Inc asked Tumblr to release danah’s subdomain, and Tumblr did just that. danah says she didn’t get any sort of notice from Tumblr, although David Karp, who appears to be in some way related to Tumblr although his Twitter profile doesn’t state as much, said on Twitter:

Hi Danah. We never reassign domains w/o notifying users first. Our support team reached out two weeks ago and didn’t hear back.

Per your last msg, your login/account are NOT dead. It looks likes you registered with a secondary email address?

Our team sent over the details. Please let me know if there’s absolutely anything I can do to help. I’m sorry for the trouble. 🙁

So it’s unclear exactly what went down… however, given that Tumblr have pulled this kind of stunt before it isn’t entirely clear that Tumblr actually did go to what one might call reasonable lengths to get in touch with danah.

Furthermore, Zephyr Inc… sorry, Zephoria Inc, have not been playing nice regarding other usernames/URLs according to danah:

A few years ago, I learned that there is a technology consulting company called Zephoria.com. And apparently, they’ve become a social media consulting company. In recent years, I’ve found that they work hard to block me from using the handle of zephoria on various social media sites. Even before the midnite land grab on Facebook, they squatted the name zephoria, probably through some payment to the company.

The irony is that Zephoria Inc not only does SEO (hm, how does “Zephoria Inc are a bunch of bullying fucktards” work for you guys?) and web dev, they also say that they do social media. Well, here’s a tip for you: If you stomp on one of social media’s most intelligent, dedicated, beloved people, you can expect to get stomped on back. Not just by danah, but by all her friends and everyone who holds her in high esteem.

A search for ‘zephoria‘ on Twitter right now shows just how much people resent bullying fucktards who think they have a right to a username just because they want it. (Hint: you don’t). More people will have heard of Zephoria Inc now than ever would have without this kerfuffle, and they all think that it’s a company that they would never do business with because they don’t play fair. It’s like a variant of the Streisand Effect, where a company does something utterly stupid which serves only to draw attention to its own stupidity.

Hopefully, Tumblr will come to their senses and give danah her URL back. And hopefully Zephoria Inc will either apologise and mend their ways, or go out of business. I’m hoping for the latter, because I just don’t need yet more fuckwits bringing social media into disrepute.

But there are two main lessons here:

1. If you are a service providing users with username-based URLs, be very, very careful how you handle requests to free up usernames even if they are dormant. You need dialogue and to come to a fair agreement which isn’t simply based on “Biggest bully wins”.

2. If you are a business and someone else has your username, suck it up (unless they are username squatting). If you are starting a business, do make sure that your business name isn’t already in use by someone else, or be willing to use a variant. if you’re going to rely on your ability to bully others into submission, you may find out that you have bitten off more than you can chew.

Zephoria Inc. have made a major error in bullying danah, as the very social media they purport to understand will now ensure that their Google search page turns up lots of content that discusses just what a bunch of dishonest, bullying charlatans they really are. Well done, chaps. Couldn’t have done better SEO if you’d tried.

UPDATE 2: danah has updated her blog with what has now happened. This is the key excerpt from that update:

10:39PM: I just got off the phone with John Maloney [President of Tumblr]. We had a lovely conversation which began with him apologizing for what he described as a human error in customer service and saying that he looked into the issue and has reinstated my account. He explicitly stated that they are working hard to have strong customer service processes where things like this don’t happen and that he feels terrible that it did happen. He said that Tumblr has only had four issues like this in the past and that they are committed to making certain that legitimate active users do not face these issues. He did say that they work hard to not allow squatting (and he argued that the Pitchfork case was one of squatting, not active use by the individual).

I read Highs and Lows of “Post Mortem” Collaboration Between Frontline, ProPublica, NPR, by Carrie Lozano over on Mediashift with interest, not least because collaboration has been a specialty of mine for many years now. Ever since I first started working with social media over seven years ago I have focused on collaboration, so a project that marries collaboration and journalism is of course going to pique my interest.

This piece, first in a series by Lozano, sets the scene, but doesn’t go into any detail about how journalists from Frontline, ProPublica and NPR actually got down to the day-to-day nitty gritty. That’s what I’m really interested in, because the collaboration tools available today make working together really easy, if – and only if – people are willing to learn and adjust the way that they communicate.

There are basically two types of collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration:

The actions of the collaborators are spread out over time

Materials are gathered or created and made available to the other team members who access them whenever they wish to

Collaborators can be spread out over different time zones

Conversations can occur slowly as there can be a delay before each participant is able to reply

The trick is in knowing what kind of collaboration you need and how to swap seamlessly between modes as required. A lot of people who don’t understand collaboration wind up using email as their primary tool, despite email being very badly suited for the work. If you’re going to collaborate with other reporters, you must set up your collaboration systems and ensure that everyone is familiar about what to use, when and how, before your project truly kicks off.

Lozano says:

there’s a learning curve to working this way as basic issues pose challenges, from how to communicate to how to share information to how to simultaneously report for different platforms. Trying to understand how it all works can be confusing, even with a front-row view, so imagine what it’s like when you’re truly in it.

Indeed. You can’t change your workflow in the middle of a big project: trying to do so will cause problems because people are focused on their work, not on their methodology. So you have to sort out ahead of time how people are going to share their research, their notes, their files, their ideas, their rough drafters and their final copy. And you need to make sure people actually use those tools, rather than clinging to familiar ways of working.

“Chaos is the ultimate form of investigative reporting,” Stephen Engelberg, managing editor of ProPublica, told me in the midst of “Post Mortem.” “You have to acknowledge that inefficiency is part of the process.” He was explaining the vicissitudes of an investigative piece, where a story can take unexpected turns all the way down to the wire. Joint reporting is not so different.

Collaboration can cause issues if people are unclear on the tools and how to use them, but social collaboration tools can and do create new efficiencies, despite projects going in unexpected directions. If everyone, for example, shares their research and keeps an eye on what others are finding, then that can save a lot of duplicated effort. Understanding what everyone else in your team is doing and how to reduce duplication is a key part of collaboration. It’s not just about doing your own thing and letting others follow on behind, but about considering how your work fits in with other people’s, and how you can all save each other a bit of time.

You also have to teach people how to work inside the collaboration tools, so that the act of writing/researching/planning becomes a de facto act of collaboration, rather than making collaboration an add-on that people do after they’ve finished their final draft. I have worked on a number of ‘open’ projects, where clients can see my notes, research and drafts in all their states of disrepair, and it’s a very different way of working. Emotionally, it’s quite hard because if you’re used to handing over only your final draft, you can feel quite vulnerable when someone can see your messy first draft, but it’s well worth it as early feedback is easier to incorporate.

At the most basic level, think about the logistics. With “Post Mortem” it was often a struggle to get everyone in the same room. At times, there would be 15 busy, bicoastal people on a conference call. It was always a juggle keeping everyone in the loop, but with that many people, I’m certain there were some who wouldn’t have minded being excluded.

Meetings and conference calls are essential to any collaborative project, but they should be reserved for discussion and decision making, and should not be used for updates. Keeping people in the loop should be done online, via wikis, blogs, and other such tools, all of which can be kept confidential. (Remember: your work blog does not have to be public!)

I have had many clients who have found that using a wiki to give people updates, set the agenda, and disseminate notes from calls and meetings cut the length of those calls and meetings by at least half. And let’s face it, there’s nothing more tedious than sitting on a call waiting for your turn to bore everyone to death with what you’ve achieved that week! But you do have to think about these processes ahead of time and ensure everyone is in the habit of adding their update and reading everyone else’s before the call. Once people realise that doing so cuts down the tedium, however, most are happy with the new process.

I shall be interested to learn more about this journalist collaboration, the tools they used and how they managed the processes of sharing information. But there’s one thing that all journalistic organisations can and must learn right now:

People outside of your organisation and industry already know a lot about collaboration: asking their advice will save you some pain.

I often worry that the industry is so convinced it is special that it needlessly eschews external expertise, instead preferring to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. You can see this in the continual re-examination of the use of blogs in journalism, despite the fact that we’ve been having that discussion for the best part of the last decade and have pretty much got it figured out. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is here, it’s just being ignored by half the industry.

Indeed, if there’s one key lesson for journalists to learn about collaboration, it’s to ask the experts who’ve been working in this field for years. Having worked on collaboration projects in many diverse sectors, from investment banking to pharmaceuticals to PR to built environment to science to media, I can promise you that journalists are no different to anyone else. Humans are reassuringly similar no matter what they do, so the lessons learnt about collaboration in pharma are just as applicable to journalism as anything else.

I hope that the exploration of collaborative journalism between Frontline, ProPublica and NPR will throw up some interesting and previously unknown lessons. But I fear that many of their problems will have been be ones they could have avoided with the right preparation. However, we shall have to wait and see!